The Idea of Perfection
Page 23
But now I must find the strength
To look Never Again in the eye
For—it is worthy of me, and in keeping with my intentions—to bring to light
Before Consciousness
The tangle of dark roots
The terrible snarl of adhesions
That inwardly drag at me with every movement—and the mind only sighs—
The deep system of the self is made to bring the past alive, ever reborn. Never Again breaks its heart: Was it really so sweet? Was it never paid for?—Even the pain from those times becomes seductive and makes itself desirable again.
—Enough, if we could see what we are
We would never be what we are.
Ψ [XII, 788], 1928
Dead leaves. The forest more beautiful after its autumn death, from its colors, more varied, more sonorous than those of life.
Can we speak of “nature” here? When it’s all a question of dying and dead things, and this splendor results as best it can from the decay of organisms from which life has withdrawn.
So abandonment, decomposition, slow oxidation are what fill our eyes with powerful positive values.
“Who made this?”
AD [XIII, 444], 1929
I only speak for the man who is alone—he who rises in media nocte, in the nakedness of his existence—as if resurrected on the other side of his consciousness, where all things seem real and strange to him—as if he had come with a lamp to a dark place crowded with unfamiliar objects that are illuminated and transformed at every step. At an hour when he was not expected, in a place that could be any other …
aj [XIV, 482], 1930
The way, so surprising when you consider it, that days have of ending in a dazzling blaze, a creation, an abundance of disintegrating lights, vast figures that fall from gold to ashes by discernible degrees; dying like heroes and gods immediately after their highest beauty, and as if their deaths were the natural and easy and necessary consequences of a law decreeing that nothing can exist after the highest beauty.
al [XIV, 605], 1930
It is on waking, in the morning, that the soul feels strange—suspended between past and future—
And both feel completely foreign—arbitrary—or taken from two infinite series of possibility—the one like a book you have just read, and the other a book you are going to read, in a library with an infinite number of volumes.
The soul rises like a star—moves through high clouds. O stranger, and faculty of being no conceivable thing!
Perhaps you are only this instant, this effect, this illusion of a pure Me, and the immense sadness of existing. Whatever you do—you are losing your time! You will never come to the end of everything your light reveals, Soul. Your whole daily prostitution to things and acts is powerless against your terrible virginity. Your crimes, your masterpieces, none of this means you have accomplished something. Mirror.
AP [XV, 271], 1931
Avenio … In spite of everything—this Avignon dawn that filters through, and the bell in the air—that has all the sonority of noon, light and sound returning me to existence. That is, to a combination of youth-sadness which I know so well, a negation and purity and profundity itself, tinged with eternity, with weariness, will and secret—a reverie of refusal. And I hear these birds—shrill—
A bell and birds, with a detested poetic melancholy—as if reminding me that they call me back to the slavery to appearances of the dumb return of things along with day. The duty to live in vain—
O how the past is near!—
Untitled notebook [XV, 559], 1932
Elegy
… And I too have made something from little nothings:
From your silence, a pain … a creature
an eterno dolor
a secret wound
From your smile, a dawn.
Untitled notebook [XVI, 77], 1932
In the middle of the still-dark countryside
a house is touched with gold, and an almond tree in blossom, alone,
Is illuminated—
A demonstration of the sun to my eyes
which do not see it directly
And a tall tree, among the dark trees and plants,
Catches fire, shaking in the cold morning breeze
A whole throng of groups and a disorder of delicate details
Of its luminous mass of green—
The olive trees in turn are born to their fine and silver-dappled figures,
The faded pink of the Judas Tree is revealed.
The red-tile roof is revealed.
The clumps of frazzled pines are revealed. The forms of the hills are revealed.
Everything is revealed with strong contrasting shadows,
The rough sketch becomes precise. Each part subdivides further.
Each fragment can live its own life.
The proof of every hypothesis is made.
I can discern each and every leaf. I am able to distinguish every object.
Doubt is no longer possible …
Names have definitively come to rest on things,
What will exist emerges and stands out.
Untitled notebook [XVIII, 32], 1935
Observation
I watch the smoke from my resting cigarette; It forms a gentle ribbon with threads along the edges that broadens, ravels, unravels, makes terraced and spiraling sheets, etc.
I am astounded, mortified at being unable to conceive how this fluid transformation, this flow of successive forms and figures that so freely and easily engender one another with such grace, fantasy, sequence and continuity, like an invention, etc.—is perceptible to me. How do I (my eye) follow this sequence? I am present as if I were listening to music. It’s the same state of being.
How do these figures add up?
Untitled notebook [XVIII, 206], 1935
Grasse—15 Dec. 35
Light snow on the ground, none on the trees—as in a Breughel, the ground only glazed over, not covered. This morning sun.
A chilly and golden impression—a feeling of childhood in me. Mixture of excitement and melancholy.
Untitled notebook [XVIII, 566], 1935
Hai-Kai
I was waiting for who knows whom? (You? or day—or—)
A thought came.
Another
The mountain seems to be waiting for something;
The living water, to be running after something;
The sun, to be slowly seeking step by step
The point from which It will see something.
Another
Suddenly the moon breaks through
The murkiness of evening
As a curious woman in a crowd
Finds herself in the front row.
Untitled notebook [XIX, 910], 1937
“How strange is what is good!” This fragrance—this creamy smoothness—the turn of this neck; and my hands moving downward over these shoulders to reach these breasts—to where they form the solidity of the bust with the continuous gentleness of touch, a series of modulations of the press of my fingers, of pressure and slipping at contact, which makes my soul the creator of what offers itself to this act from place to place and better and better. I make and remake you—I cannot abandon this ultimate act, lose this song of my hands.
Untitled notebook [XX, 710], 1937
Psalm N
Hear, my Lord, what this moment sings at the open window bursting with plants and trees and blue depths riddled, sown with roofs like little points—and scored with the flight of birds, as it is peopled with their rumors and chirps …
It says, even if you felt you were truly happy, and possessed of every desirable thing, in the fullness of good fortune, unable to find the day’s fault, the stain in the sun, the instant’s vice, the crack or spot of rust, etc.—
Still, you would have to face the terrible response to all this perfection—etc.
Perfectio
n destroys itself. Nothing is more destructive! The fruit engenders the worm, and the Zenith the Nadir.
—Eternity is the instant that suffices to consume all time.
Etc.—How are you reborn, life, from death where your consummation is found?
Etc. So you did not love me, since you are able to catch your breath, and gaze …
Untitled notebook [XXII, 291], 1939
May 15
40
Malmaison
6:30 radio broadcast
This peaceful garden—the sound of artillery—news of the fall of mobilized Holland—A blow. Beautiful sky. Gentle sun. The children over there, in the fighting. Every noise makes my heart stop. And complete contradiction seizes my being. Being, you are no longer Me. Thirst to know, fear of knowing. Rush of strength and lapse of weakness. Strange combats of present and future—
The gardener is raking, and his child playing nearby.
3:30 Visit. History of English.
Rueil-Paris-Dinard I [XXIII, 298], 1940
So many things you have never really seen, in this street where you pass 6 times a day, in your room where you live so many hours every day!—Observe the angle the edge of that dresser makes with the window-pane. It must be reclaimed from the ordinary, from the visible and unseen,—it must be saved,—and given whatever you give by mere imitation, from the insufficiency of your sensibility, to the most insignificant landscape, sunset, storm over the sea, or piece in a museum. Those are ready-made gazes. But give to this man on the street, this corner, this prosaic hour and object—and you will be repaid a hundredfold …
Dinard II [XXIII, 480], 1940
I would have liked to devote you, my Head, to forming the crystal of each thing—and for you to divide the disorder presented by space and developed by time, in order to draw from them the purities that would make you a world of your own, so within that refractive structure your light would return and close instantly on itself, substituting order for space and for time an eternity. And so I would be without being, and not without not being—and since death, like life, is merely an effect of the natural world, and both are inseparable from it, it would come to pass that death, decomposing and resolving the world thus, and life with it, would evaporate along with the one and along with the other.
Untitled notebook [XXIV, 3], 1940
Hardly had Elihu and the girl of Canaan finished accomplishing the act of the flesh, and as their eyes were readjusting to the diversity of things of the light, than they were seized by the same dread, for there at the foot of the bed of their abomination the Angel was standing like a flame.
His voice a sword of ice, he spoke straight to their hearts, which were beating with one and the same terror: What have you done? Behold, you have mingled your bodies with iniquity and exchanged your souls and shared a voluptuous act as thieves share their spoils. You have stolen from the Lord the power of fire within you, and sacrificed it to this work of fornication, laboring together, each according to his nature …
—But Elihu spoke out, saying: It is true, Your Grace, but may I tell you why we did it, and what is its meaning, this which you take as a sacrifice in sin? We know you cannot understand it, nor do you feel its need, for you are what you are, and you are an intimate of the fire of the Eternal—In which you take part by your very essence, and you burn in the presence of the Most High as a piece of marble in the sun becomes resplendent in itself, and penetrates itself with its force and reflects it in all directions etc. But we who are made of mud and who live so far from the Light, in truth we are ignorant of It like beasts, and all we have to make us the slightest bit worthy of Him is what we are. And so we have chosen the best instant of our lives, the sweetest and also the most ardent of our acts, the one we desire above all, and which is endowed with the gift of creation—We thereby detach ourselves from all things and learn that there exists an extreme mode of existence where, it is true, we can only live a nearly indivisible instant—if this is living at all, for it is something else entirely: an instant where neither thought nor objects, nor even our knowledge of ourselves, may follow us. What could it be, this shard broken off from who knows what flash of eternity, that resembles nothing else—no more than that flash’s gleam resembles the color of things, but rather blinds the eyes? Is it not the doorway to the eternal, and what other means do we have of lifting ourselves from what surrounds us and hems us in, and from the earth and the life we live there, enslaved?
How, and by what path, could beings who have never heard of the Almighty, and to whom He never revealed Himself through the Word, come to an inkling of his existence? True, beholding the order and splendor of the heavens, and living beings and their marvelous preservation, would surely make them wonder and search. And maybe they would come to the idea of a supreme will. But they would worship the sun and the stars, and would go no further than such superstitions. They would fashion idols, for how could they give themselves a master and creator who resembles nothing at all? The Incomparable! For this is what the true God must be, if we are not mistaken.
This is why, searching among our experiences for what could lead us to truth, we found in this extreme sensation, so unrelated to all others (except perhaps to sharp pain), so irreducible to thought or the world’s objects, a blinding sign that is called a Pleasure but is nothing like a pleasure—etc.
These things being said, the Angel dissipated as consciousness dissipates before the incomprehensible.
Untitled notebook [XXIV, 21–23], 1940
A day is a leaf on the tree of your life.
Untitled notebook [XXIV, 315], 1941
A moan in the night— “Who is crying there”
Cat, woman, or breeze— (a moan is heard)
or life, as it is—
Moaning before daybreak
For being what it is.
7br 41 [XXV, 107], 1941
Question and discourse
What could, what should, a “poet” do today? The state of things of the soul, of the mind, and this art. But before I had set the parts of this thought before me … an image took form in my mind and made space there:
(1) Station on the Terrace—
I went up to the rooftop, the highest point of my mind’s abode—There is where age, reflection, expectations all lead—those that were justified, and those that came to nothing, the great successes, the failures, and the people, proper names, critical reviews, that have been forgotten etc.—
And gleaming in the night sky of poetry, subject only to the laws of the Universe of Language, were the constellations, which rise, which set, which reappear …
There was “Hérodiade,” the “Afternoon,” “Gautier’s Tomb”—etc. but the authors’ names are gone now. Individuals no longer matter.
And as I was contemplating these “signs,” the above-mentioned question was posed—Posed like a moment of pause and mute power, like a great bird descending suddenly on my shoulders and suddenly being transformed into a heavy weight. But this great bird’s weight made me feel it could carry me off. And it stole me away, me and my 70 years, me and my memories, my observations, my tastes, and my fundamental injustice.
And I saw, above all, the value and the beauty, the great excellence, of everything I have not done.
Here is your oeuvre—said a voice
And I beheld everything I had not done.
And I saw more clearly than ever that I was not the one who has done what I have done—rather, I was he who has not done what I have not done—What I have not done was therefore perfectly beautiful, in perfect keeping with the impossibility of being done,
and this (that which is unknown to others), I saw it, I understood it, and I would even say I held and touched it with an extreme and extraordinary Precision.
If you will, my Reason, I should say—(you will allow me to say)—that my Soul, which is your soul too, felt like the hollow form of a case—or the hollow of a mold, and this emptiness (felt itself) waiting f
or an admirable object—a sort of material bride that could not exist—since that divine form, that total absence, that Being which was only Non-Being and like the Being of what cannot Be—required nothing less than an impossible matter, and the living hollow of that form knew that such a substance did not exist and would never exist in the world of bodies—and of acts …
In the same way, the mortal convinced of his God, whose attributes he conceives by forming them through successive negations of the faults and evils he finds in the world, must feel the essential presence and absence of He who is as necessary to him as the Center is to an impenetrable sphere, which we finally recognize as a sphere by exploring its surface and reasoning about the connections between its points …
That was my oeuvre.
Labors, suffering, events, pleasures and blows of life, mostly hopes but also despair, sleepless nights, charming friends, real women, hours, days—sudden centuries, foolish mistakes, hard times … ah—all this, and so many years—it took, it had taken all this, and the disgust or disdain or regret or remorse, and the mixing together and the refusal of all this—for this marvelous core to be hollowed out, by dint of negations, from the mass of existence and of fused and confused experiences, a masterpiece at last—unbearable, and the triumph of the impossibly pure! …
Here (2)—The initial question. Analysis of this poetic will—and begin with a terrible Why? This why asks: where does one find the will and energy to address the sort of men our time has to offer? Even the best of them only think of the present—They are incapable of such a thought: Creating means creating oneself.
Untitled notebook [XXV, 618ff], 1942
Psalm
Every night the skullcap hemisphere is plunged in a bath of darkness and stars, and all life is immersed along with it.
God says: I will bathe you against your will at every turn of the wheel like the wheel of a mill, etc.
Untitled notebook [XXVI, 215], 1942
The tree leans over its image in the calm water.
Untitled notebook [XXVIII, 580], 1944
Ego—Matutina. Facing myself, I am unsure what to do. Nothing is willing.
Time flows silkily or simmers undifferentiated at the back of my hearing.